Norwich — The proposed 2019-20 city education budget looks very much like the proposed budget from a year ago, which was cut by nearly $4.6 million by the City Council last June.

The current $78.46 million budget is a projected $2.47 million in the red, and school officials said Friday that was predictable based on the council's cuts last year. The school board, when it approved that budget, had warned it would end with a deficit.

A freeze in spending, as well as $1 million in health insurance savings attributed to a conversion to high-deductible premiums, helped cut the projected deficit, school Business Administrator Athena Nagel said.

But the school system’s ability to cut the deficit further is dwindling, she said, as schools now are swapping supplies, including paper goods, as one building runs out of something another might have in stock.

“We’re not letting them spend it,” Nagel said of the school supplies budget. “We’re literally sharing toilet paper, moving supplies from school to school.”

She added that the $120,000 total budget for custodial supplies will be spent by the end of the year, but the total is inadequate for a district Norwich’s size, with seven elementary schools, two middle schools and two preschool centers. Nagel slashed the original instructional supplies budget to a projected $48,000 by the end of this year.

The new proposed $83.3 million 2019-20 budget, reviewed by the Board of Education Budget Expenditure Committee on Thursday, would be flat-funded compared to the original request from last year, Superintendent Abby Dolliver said. Certified salaries would remain the same at $18.5 million, despite salary increases of less than 1 percent for teachers and administrators.

The budget adds 13 para-educators who were hired this year to help alleviate large class sizes in some grades, Nagel said. Their salaries were covered this year through savings in the salary account gained by shifting other positions to grants. In next year’s proposed budget, the 13 para-educators were placed in the support salaries account, which would increase by $600,000 over this year’s requested total.

The budget includes an increase in capital costs to pay for much-needed repairs to an aging portable classroom used for special-needs students at the John B. Stanton School and to purchase a used plow truck for the Veterans’ Memorial School and a new vehicle for school maintenance staff to use districtwide. Nagel said the current seven-year-old maintenance vehicle has nearly 200,000 miles.

The budget schedule calls for the full Board of Education to review and adopt the preliminary budget at its 5:30 p.m. meeting March 12 at Kelly Middle School. City Manager John Salomone will present his proposed budget, including a bottom-line total for the school budget, to the City Council on April 1. The school board will explain its budget to the council on April 4, and the first public hearing on school and city budgets is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. April 11 at City Hall.

c.bessette@theday.com